Qualitative Proposal & Analysis Flashcards
naturalistic approach
- aims to maintain fidelity to the real world
- stresses the importance of social reality in people’s perceptions of their environment
- emphasis on process and meaning
why do qualitative research
- investigate little-known phenomena
- identify or discover categories of meaning
- generate hypotheses for future research
participants in qualitative research
small sample
situated in real life contexts
obtained from a wide variety of sources
rich in detail
selecting a sample
- not statistically representative
- tends to be purposive
- select people with a range of experiences
specific sampling techniques
- maximum variation sampling
- theoretical sampling
- homogenous sampling
- sampling for typical cases
- sampling for extreme or deviant cases
- snowball/ chain sampling
- criterion sampling
when do we stop sampling
- when we reach saturation
- theoretical analysis complete
- no new themes come up in data collection
- existing themese well understood
strengths of interviews
- elicits personal reactions
- permits non-rational or inconsistent responses
- permits unanticipated responses
- data is often extremely detailed and rich
limitations of interviews
- time-consuming
- may generate vast amounts of data to analyse
- impossible to generalise findings to wide population
think aloud interviews
used to test questionnaires, websites, leaflets etc.
types of written data
- unsolicited
- solicited
- pre-existing research data/ archive data
unsolicited written data
research questions about public discourse/ social representations
solicited written data
address subjective experience
issues with archive data
- consent
- sampling
- between original data and research question
issues with unsolicited data
- permission
- need to understand original context
purpose of communication
issues with solicited data
- clear instructions to participants
- how to encourage people to write ‘enough’
written data strengths
- high ecological validity
- insight at socio-cultural level
- access dispered/ rare individuals
- answer sensitive questions without face-to-face contact
- can obtain prospective longitudinal data
written data limitations
- participants may not write enough
- can be difficult to probe for more details
- data may not be rich/ detailed enough to sustain through qualitative analysis
aims of focus groups
- elicit shared understanding of a topic
- examine the collective sense-making process
- explore how feelings, attitudes and beliefs are jointly constructed in a group situation
what should you not use focus groups for?
- individual perspectives and experiences
- individual attitudes and opinions
- the range of attitudes that people hold about a particular topic
strengths of focus groups
- can provide active demonstrations of which arguments and ideas on a topic are the most powerful in a group
- can provide rich and detailed data
- avoids direct ‘expert’ interviewing
- can produce more natural talk than in an interview situation
limitations of focus groups
- can be difficult to arrange/ organise
- greater risk of distress to participants
- requires practice
- transcription is time-consuming
issues with online methods
- data integrity
- online rapport and trust
strengths of online methods
- good fit for researching online behaviours
- reflect cultural trends
- low cost
- naturalistic data
- offers anonymity
limitations of online methods
- lack of nonverbal cues
- ethical challenges
- cannot make inferences beyond internet users
- cannot verify participants identities
- constraints of technology
- risks of technology
steps of reflexive thematic analysis
- familiarising yourself with data
- generating initial codes
- searching for themes
- reviewing themes
- defining and naming themes
- producing the report
